The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  On April 10, 1778, Jones finally set sail with his crew on a mission of his own design.

  The Ranger headed straight for England.

  In letters, Jones revealed deep anger at the British over two issues. First, when American sailors were captured, the British treated them not as prisoners of war but as traitors, which Jones viewed as the British intentionally failing to recognize him and his fellow seamen as fighting men. He hoped, in raiding England, to kidnap a high-profile prisoner and force an exchange that would repatriate captured American sailors. The second was the growing British practice of torching civilian ports. Jones aimed “to put an end, by one good fire in England of shipping, to all the burnings in America.”10 Jones wasn’t the first American skipper to try to poach prizes off the coast of England. The previous summer, the Reprisal, the Lexington, and the Dolphin, under the lead of the Reprisal’s captain, Lambert Wickes, took twenty-one ships among them in two forays in and near English waters. Jones intended to press further. On April 14, the Ranger encountered a different Dolphin, a merchant brigantine ferrying flaxseed from Ostend, Belgium, to Wexford, Ireland. He captured the crew, scuttled the ship, and then sailed on. Two days later, the Ranger came within sight of the southeast coast of Ireland and then cut north through St. George’s Channel into the Irish Sea, where it encountered the 250-ton Lord Chatham heading for Dublin with one hundred hogshead of porter, as well as hemp and iron. Jones seized the ship, installed a prize captain and crew, and ordered it to set sail for Brest, France.

  On April 18, the Ranger, nearing the entry to the Solway Firth—Jones was, in a sense, returning home—encountered the wherry (a small sailing vessel) Hussar, which carried a few light guns and tax inspectors. The British ship came alongside and tried to hail the Ranger; Jones’s crew opened fire with muskets. The Hussar fell away and after some quick maneuvers managed to evade the faster Ranger by sailing into the shallow waters of Luce Bay, where Jones dared not follow.

  Despite these encounters, the Ranger’s mission remained unknown to most of the ships sailing the waters between England and Ireland, giving Jones the advantage of surprise. Jones took two more vessels and had his eye on the HMS Drake, an eighteen-gun sloop of war guarding trade in and out of Belfast, but bad weather interfered, sending Jones back across the sea to shelter the Ranger in a lee off the coast of Scotland. Bad weather wasn’t his only concern: Jones’s crew was becoming increasingly frustrated with—and was complaining about—Jones’s focus on causing damage ahead of seizing prize ships. The captain’s autocratic impulses were beginning to chafe on the men he most relied upon for the success of the mission—and, indeed, for survival.11

  Still, Jones pressed on. These were familiar waters for him, and he had been nurturing a plan that he hoped would send a clear message to the British. It would be an audacious act by an audacious man.

  By April 22, the bad weather had turned fair, and from the deck of the Ranger “the three kingdoms”—Scotland, England, and the independent Isle of Man—“were, as far as the eye could reach, covered with snow.” Jones made for Whitehaven, the port city whence he first sailed at age thirteen, though light winds made for slow progress. Around midnight he left the Ranger with thirty-one crew members aboard two rowboats and pulled for the pier. Dawn was beginning to seep into the sky as they made landfall. Jones sent one rowboat to the north side of the harbor with orders to set afire the ships moored there. Increasingly concerned that his crew might abandon him, Jones left a trusted seaman to guard the second boat and led the remaining crew to scale the walls of a small fort, where they bound the unarmed sentinels in their guardhouse, and drove spikes into the touch holes of the cannons, rendering them useless. Jones and a crewman named Green then moved along the shore spiking all the cannons they found.

  Jones was perplexed by the lack of fire to the north, where the first boat’s crew should have already done its damage. When he returned to the landing spot, he found the first crew was already there. Both crews, it turned out, had let their “candles”—smoldering, sulphur-caked canvas torches—go out, so they had nothing with which to torch the ships.

  Great Britain, and its newspapers, viewed the Scottish-born John Paul Jones as a pirate and a traitor.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, the Harris & Ewing Collection, reproduction 1 number LC-DIG-hec-07972

  The sky was lightening, but Jones “would by no means retract while any hopes of success remained.” He sent a small party to raid nearby homes to find some embers; they returned both with fire and with rousted residents to keep them from sounding the alarm. Jones selected one ship, the Thompson, in the midst of “at least 150 others” that had been stranded by the receding tide, and instructed his crew to light it on fire. His men found a barrel of tar and poured it down a hatchway to feed the flames. They reignited the canvas torches and tossed them across the decks of other ships, in hopes of expanding the fire zone.

  Yet Jones had an unforeseen problem: one of his crewmen, David Freeman, had snuck away and was pounding on doors, warning residents that raiders were burning the port. Some later speculated that he was a closet Loyalist who had signed on with Jones in order to get a ride back to England. Jones brandished pistols to fend off the gathering unarmed crowd, and once the fire was in full roar, he and his raiders reboarded their rowboats and oared back to the Ranger, which had sailed in closer to the port to meet them. Some of the Whitehaven residents ran for their cannons but found them spiked. They managed to scrounge up a few others (Jones speculated later that the guns were aboard some of the ships) and open fire on the retreating raiders, but by then the rowboats were safely out of effective range. Despite the flames and the tar, the damage to the ships in port was minimal. While Jones had lost one turncoat, the raiding party slipped away with three hostages.12

  But Jones wasn’t done. A few hours later, the Ranger approached a headland on the north shore of the Solway Firth, and Jones and a detachment went ashore in a raiding party to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk. The lord wasn’t home, but his wife and children were. When Jones ordered his men back to the ship, the crew objected; many had signed on because of the promise of prizes. So far, Jones had seized little of value. To defuse their anger, Jones relented and let the crew enter the house, where they terrorized the earl’s family but left them unharmed as they made off with 160 pounds of the family silver.

  In some ways, the raid was personal. Jones and Lord Selkirk knew each other, at least in passing, and Jones would later buy back a purloined tray and return it to the Selkirk estate. He had chosen Lord Selkirk as his victim because the earl was close to the king, Jones knew the territory, and he saw it as the most efficient way of grabbing a valuable hostage with which to force the release of American sailors. In a post-raid letter to Selkirk’s wife, Jones drove home the point that what was good for the British soldiers should be good for the Americans. “Some officers who were with me could not forbear expressing their discontent, observing that, in America, no delicacy was shown by the English, who took away all sorts of moveable property—setting fire not only to town, and to the houses of the rich without distinction, but not even sparing the wretched hamlets and mil[k] cows of the poor and helpless, at the approach of an inclement winter.” His raiders, Jones wrote, wanted their spoils and their revenge.13

  The Ranger set sail again. The damage was minor, and England’s losses were light, but as word spread across the kingdom, so did fear. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser reported on the raids on April 28 and gave details of the ship and crew provided to investigators by Freeman, the turncoat crewman: “A number of expresses have been dispatched to all the capital seaports in the kingdom where any depredations are likely to occur; all strangers in town are, by order of the magistrate, to be secured and examined; similar notices have been forwarded through the country.” Many newspapers included details of the run-in with the Hussar and wrote of the ships being sent in pursuit of the Ranger, while issuing calls for better fortif
ications along the coast. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser observed that the raids and the “audacious conduct” of Jones and the men of the Ranger “will have this good effect: It will teach our men of war on the coast station, and our cruisers in St. George’s channel, to keep a more sharp lookout.”

  Jones next went in search of the Drake, the eighteen-gun warship stationed off Belfast. This time the weather was better, and after an hour of intense and close-quarters battle, the Ranger gained the advantage. A musket shot to the head killed the Drake’s captain, and another grievous wound left his second in command on the verge of death. Cannon and grape shot—an artillery version of a shotgun shell—had wounded men on both ships and shredded the sails and rigging on the Drake, leaving it all but dead in the water. Leaderless, the crew quit the fight and gave up the Drake to Jones. The Ranger lost three men. As the British sent more ships to the channel in search of Jones, the American captain had his crew quickly refit the Drake with basic rigging and sails, and sent the two ships sailing north and then west around Ireland, eluding the searching warships. They arrived in Brest on May 8, 1778.

  If Jones’s goal were to agitate the British navy and citizenry, then it would have been a good trip. But his goal was different, and he fell short of his three main objectives: capturing a notable hostage to force the release of imprisoned American sailors, burning villages in revenge for British atrocities in America, and amassing plunder for his crew. The lack of spoils proved to be the biggest problem. In the hours before the attack on the Drake, the Ranger’s crew huddled below deck so the Drake spyglasses wouldn’t spot them. Talk of mutiny over the lack of loot arose, fanned by Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, and the crew’s mood worsened at sea when a communication failure led to mixed signals and a botched attempt to seize another ship. Simpson, in charge of the Drake, thought Jones had signaled him to continue on to Brest, when in fact Jones had ordered him to sail with the Ranger as it chased the other ship, which slipped away. When the Ranger and Drake reunited, Jones, presuming his subordinate had intentionally spurned his order, had Simpson put in chains; the crew, though, faulted Jones. It was a surly and resentful band of seamen that finally put into Brest. Jones eventually paroled Simpson so that he could sail the Ranger home after other unspecified plans emerged for Jones, much “to the joy and satisfaction of the whole ship’s company.”14

  Other than the success against the Drake, Jones’s trip was a mixed bag. The Ranger seized several ships, but they sold for less money than Jones and, more important, his crew had hoped. The port of Whitehaven had barely been scorched. And though Jones had failed to kidnap Lord Selkirk, he did manage to sweep up the crew of the Drake—some 133 strong—and other hostages, who were eventually part of a trade through which the British released 228 American sailors held as pirates and traitors.

  The biggest success, though, was one of perception. Jones’s reputation soared as one of the fledgling American navy’s savviest captains.

  It would take ten months idling in France before another ship could be arranged for Jones, and six more months before it was outfitted and ready to sail. The ship was an East India trader named Duc de Duras, which Jones—with an eye toward keeping one of his patrons, Benjamin Franklin, happy—renamed Bonhomme Richard, after the French translation of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Jones also freshened his crew, sifting through the unattached sailors in port, including a number of American sailors released by their British captors during prisoner exchanges. One of them, Nathaniel Fanning, met Jones, who lied and said that the Richard, once she was outfitted, would sail directly to America and Fanning could get passage as a midshipman. Other officers told Fanning that Jones’s true destination would be the waters off Great Britain; Fanning, lacking any other options, signed on anyway.15

  When Jones and his fleet of seven ships left Île de Groix on August 14, 1779, they were to be an ancillary part of a broad military plan hatched by the French to invade southern England: the ill-fated Armada of 1779. With Spanish allies, they planned for a fleet with sixty-four ships of the line carrying 4,774 cannons, and scores of lighter craft arrayed against a depleted British navy, which had sent most of its ships to the colonies. The French part of the armada, which included forty thousand soldiers to serve as an invasion force, set sail in early June to rendezvous with the Spanish, who were slow in arriving. By then, smallpox and other diseases had swept through the French fleet. The ultimate goal was to land the fighting men somewhere in Plymouth as the start of an invasion, but with thousands of men dead or dying from illness, and food and water running low, the invasion was called off, and the ships limped back to their home ports.

  Jones, meanwhile, had set out for his part of the plan, which was to sail around the western side of Ireland, over the top of Scotland and into the North Sea. He knew nothing of the failed invasion, and two of his ships—both privateers—quit the mission before the fleet reached its northward turn. Weather—fog, followed by a gale—separated many of the rest of the ships. Seven of his crew, all Irish seamen, slipped away in a small tender and made for shore; loyal crew members in a second tender who were sent to capture the runaways were themselves taken captive, news that quickly reached the newspapers. The London Evening Post reported “the country was in an uproar” and that the escaping Irish sailors warned “that Jones’s intention was to scour the coast, and burn as many places as he could.”

  It wasn’t. The Bonhomme Richard continued north and then east and south—taking prizes or burning merchant ships as they sailed—and by mid-September the fleet of now four ships was off Dunbar, the southern entrance to the Firth of Forth, with Edinburgh a reachable target. Jones toyed with invading the Scottish seaport to draw British forces away from the south coast, where he presumed the invasion was underway. He hatched a plan to occupy the port of Leith and demand a ransom—under the threat of burning it to the ground. He had trouble persuading the French captains in his fleet, and by the time they came around, a gale blew up that led Jones to delay acting. One of his prize ships sank during the storm, and he released another for ransom rather than see it sink too. By the time the winds died down, Jones’s ships had been spotted, the alarm raised, and the element of surprise destroyed. So Jones turned his ships and headed south, collecting prizes as he went, though ships that got away continued to sound the alert. Rumors spiraled over the islands and were repeated in the newspapers that Jones had been sighted in several places—warships were still looking for him off Ireland. On the east coast of Scotland, where Jones had indeed been sighted, the fear reached near frenzy level.

  Jones might have had more success if his fellow captains and their crews had shown as much fear of him. Throughout the voyage, Jones wrestled with insubordination from the other ships. Captain Pierre Landais, the French skipper of the Alliance, was a particular problem, refusing even to board the Bonhomme Richard to discuss attack plans and greeting an emissary from Jones’s ship with an oath-laden denunciation of the man himself.

  Still, Jones had a much better relationship with the crew of the Bonhomme Richard than the one he had maintained with the Ranger’s crew. Jones selected most of the men himself. With plenty of time in port while the ship was readied, Jones was able to train with the men, shaping them into a loyal and effective fighting force. Still autocratic and prone to angry outbursts, Jones had earned the men’s loyalty “like a temperamental orchestra leader who enrages almost every musician under him, yet produces a magnificent ensemble.”16 Yet he also treated them, in anger, to the tantrums of a spoiled child. After losing the chase for one ship, Jones crowned members of his staff with his “trumpet,” or megaphone. In another instance, after an argument with one of his lieutenants, Jones ordered the man to the brig and kicked at his back as the man descended below deck.17

  With the ships once again separated after the storm, Jones made for the water off Flamborough Head, near Hull, which he had prearranged as a rendezvous point. As dawn broke on September 23, the Bonhomme Richard, the Allian
ce (with the unreliable Landais in charge), the Pallas, and the small cutter Vengeance were all together again, cruising off the headland looking for prize ships. Around two in the afternoon, they spotted an invigorating sight—more than forty sails from a convoy of trade ships en route from the Baltic under escort by the forty-four-gun British Serapis, and the twenty-gun sloop of war Countess of Scarborough. The captain of the Serapis, Richard Pearson, had been warned by a boat sent out from Hull that Jones was in the area, and as the convoy cut closer to shore the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough faced off against Jones and his ships. The Serapis was far better equipped (it had a double deck of cannons) and was more seaworthy than the Bonhomme Richard, which would help it survive the battle to come. But the Serapis would then sail away with Jones in charge.

  The battle remains a classic encounter of the sailing era. Just after sunset on a moonlit night, Jones, his Bonhomme Richard flying a British flag, sailed to within hailing distance of the Serapis. The vessel’s suspicious captain—he thought it was Jones but wasn’t yet sure—hollered out for Jones to identify his ship. A crew member, at Jones’s order, shouted back a lie, and Pearson asked again for the ship’s captain to identify himself. At that, Jones ordered that the British colors be struck and replaced by the new American insignia as both captains ordered their gunners to fire. At that close range, the power of the shots was incredible, but the biggest damage to the Bonhomme Richard came when two of its own cannons exploded, heavily damaging the ship and killing or maiming a large number of the crew.